"Should I Pivot Out of a Slow Business or Double Down?" | #FFLTV Ep 3 QA

Brian Peyton asks, how do you know when to pivot out of a slow business versus doubling down on your effort?

All right, so the first answer to this question is, I never go into anything unless I know that I'm willing to give at least one year to seeing something through, at least a year. And usually I know that about a year in, I'm just gonna start seeing things move. If it's less than a year, I'm doing really frigging good. But chances are at about the year point is when things are gonna start upticking. Be prepared for the first year to be just getting things dialed in so that you are actually able to maybe take money off the table at that point. But ideally you're looking at a two to three year horizon. And if you can project that long until you're frigging rich, that's the time horizon that you want to have. But at least a year. Commit something before you ever decide if it's a success or a failure. When I started the Freedom Fast Lane podcast, I said I'm going to commit to this for a year before I even analyze the result. If I do this for a year and I don't like it, that's when I can say I'm not going to do this anymore or I'm going to do this differently. But until you've done something for a year, it's really hard to be able to determine if something is a success or if it's a failure. On a more practical side of things, if you are not getting feedback from the marketplace that is taking you in a specific direction, that is usually for one of two reasons. It's A, your product isn't what they want, or B, you're not putting it in front of the audience, you're not putting it in front of the market. So when I'm looking at a business, the area where they usually need to double down is on the awareness or the influence side. Are they aggressively putting their product or their service in front of the people that want it? Are they advertising to the audiences that are already there? Are they going out and running ads on YouTube or on Facebook? Or are they really, really pressing the gas on Amazon or wherever they're taking orders? Are they willing to lose money? Are they being that aggressive? Because if not, we don't have enough feedback to be able to make a decision? The only point in which I would say let's pull the plug, like this is a slow business. Let's pull it is if we're doing all of that, but we're not getting leads or sales if it's very clear that the product line that we have is not solving a pain point, or we've had a competitor come out and they've just crushed us. For example, in my younger years, I actually had a little tech company. It was called mytimeline.com I think the page actually might be up still. I haven't thought about it in a long time, but it was this idea that you could archive your life on a daily basis. You'd get a text message or you'd get an email at the end of every day saying, what did you do today? You'd upload your pictures with a short journal entry and every day you would archive your life you wanted to search for. When did I go to California? I'll search California. It'll pull it up in your Timeline. We launched, and I kid you not, seven days later, Facebook announced Timeline. And all of the language was someone posted to your Timeline. View this on my Timeline. It was like they had looked into the future and seen my timeline. So this was years ago. We looked at ourselves and said, do we really want to compete against Facebook? No. This competitor has all of the users. They're going to kill us. And we pulled the plug. So if you're getting crushed with no end in sight or the product just is not matching with the audience, that's when it would be time to pull the plug. But most of the time, I find businesses just aren't being aggressive enough and they need to double down.